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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

The BoxMaker Packs up Peace of Mind with ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage

Company Overview:

The BoxMaker works with the Northwest’s leading organizations to deliver packaging and displays that amplify the performance of their people, processes, and brand. Since 1981, The BoxMaker has continuously expanded the range, depth, and value of its offerings to become a premier provider of custom packaging design, manufacturing, supply, and fulfillment services. Today, they serve clients along the I-5 corridor from Southern Oregon to the Canadian border and east to Spokane and Northern Idaho. Through strategic partners, they also serve Hawaii and Alaska.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s capacity and price point had no comparison
  • RTL ensures The BoxMaker’s data can be recovered in the event of a ransomware attack
  • Excellent support model with assigned support engineer and quick resolutions
  • ExaGrid offers seamless integration with Veeam
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ExaGrid Offers Best Features at the Best Price Point

The BoxMaker had been using a combination of solutions making up their backup storage—Veeam with Tegile IntelliFlash and managed services from Infrascale. Bob Griffin is The BoxMaker’s system administrator and was responsible for seeking a new backup storage solution as the IT team had struggled with running out of storage space for doing disk-to-disk backups. One of their solution providers recommended using ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage with Veeam, so the IT team pursued a full evaluation.

“We primarily looked at ExaGrid’s capacity and capabilities. We like that ExaGrid worked with a 10GbE network infrastructure, robust features, and offered a storage capacity that was adequate for what we were trying to do and met our needs today and tomorrow. Our previous solution was simply lacking in those areas,” said Griffin. “We liked that ExaGrid integrates so well with Veeam, but it was the storage capacity at the price point that attracted us most, so we ended up going with ExaGrid.”

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes.

 

"“In dealing with all the various storage solution providers and vendors in general, I would classify ExaGrid support as ‘superior’. They are always there for me, helping me manage my environment. They’ve always been very attentive to helping me manage our ExaGrid system, keeping it up to date, and leveraging its capabilities. I’ve really appreciated their resources and knowledge.” "

Bob Griffin, System Administrator

Comprehensive Security Offers Peace of Mind

ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage provides industry-leading comprehensive security, including ransomware recovery. “We are leveraging ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock technology. This gives me peace of mind while fulfilling our security goals. I especially like that ExaGrid uses role-based access, including a Security Officer that must approve any of the changes that an administrator has submitted to the environment. This approval by a super-user is another safety net, and that’s a great feature!” said Griffin.

ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.

 

High Performance for Large Backup Jobs

The majority of BoxMaker’s data is graphics artwork. As a box and packaging manufacturer, they are required to accumulate an enormous amount of graphics information originating from design to finished artwork. In addition, they have a significant amount of data that is commonplace—Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, PDFs, accounting information, and various other business information.

The BoxMaker policy for optimal service to their clients is to keep graphics artwork for as long as ten years, which Griffin backs up on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule. “I can stop worrying because I know that the data is there and that the solution is reliable. I find the ease of operation, including the overall interface and configuration to make my life much easier,” said Griffin.

“Our ExaGrid system has provided excellent performance, including restorations if needed. It’s doing quite well, and in fact, it has more capabilities than I’m currently leveraging. I look forward to utilizing even more of its performance capabilities like large-block access and VLANing. Our ExaGrid support engineer is very instrumental in our infrastructure. I’ve come to rely on him quite a bit for making sure I find ways to optimize.”

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

ExaGrid and Veeam can instantly recover a file or VMware virtual machine by running it directly from the ExaGrid appliance in the event that the file is lost, corrupted or encrypted or the primary storage VM becomes unavailable. This instant recovery is possible because of ExaGrid’s Landing Zone – a high-speed disk cache on the ExaGrid appliance that retains the most recent backups in their complete form. Once the primary storage environment has been brought back to a working state, the VM backed up on the ExaGrid appliance can then be migrated to primary storage for continued operation.

Scale-Out Allows for Easy Expansion

Griffin appreciated ExaGrid’s unique scale-out architecture when planning for the future. “Capacity planning was a big piece of our decision-making process. ExaGrid’s scale-out solution is exactly what we needed to support our future growth.”

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour.

ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it.

 

ExaGrid’s Superior Support Stands Out

“In dealing with all the various storage solution providers and vendors in general, I would classify ExaGrid support as ‘superior’. They are always there for me, helping me manage my environment. They’ve always been very attentive to helping me manage our ExaGrid system, keeping it up to date, and leveraging its full capabilities. I’ve really appreciated their resources and knowledge level. Installation was a very easy process, and our support engineer is very involved every step of the way,” said Griffin.

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

ExaGrid and Veeam 

Veeam’s backup solutions and ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage combine for the industry’s fastest backups, fastest restores, a scale-out storage system as data grows, and a strong ransomware recovery story – all at the lowest cost.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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